nm. duplicate.
I have to admit I’m hard-pressed to point to any atheists who object to birth control on moral grounds.
Well, maybe some hardcore Heinlein fans who subscribe to the dictum that the ultimate question of ethics boils down to “does this support or detract from the continuation of the human species?”
Piffle. The United States is not a collective. Nor is the rest of the modern world.
As long as we’re throwing out non sequiturs, I’d like to remind you that pepperoni is not in fact a variety of ocean-dwelling orchid.
Prove your points then.
Especially the one that private property is only what is “allowed” by government. Go.
I always love it when someone distorts what someone else has said, and then demands that they support it.
Being to lazy to read the whole thread, someone prob already mentioned this but it just seems far simpler to limit financial benefits after X number of kids.
Ah, nothing spells freedom like eugenics!
Easy peasy. According to the point you made earlier, squids are the original founders of the Illuminati. How many tickles does it take to tickle a squid? Ten-tickles. TEN-TICKLES. Get it? Ten is a sacred number, and it’s not of-ten that I’m able to rebut someone so easily. Booyah!
Of course, if you’d like me to refute points that I’ve actually made, I might be a little more rigorous about it.
The world cannot handle more rigorous squid tickling.
Here’s exactly what was said.
Money is only your property at the sufferance of government.
He or she made the statement, let him or her back it up, please.
Which is different from what you demanded that he prove.
This is rather self evident, though not all that informative. If the government (collectively representing the will of the people) decide that all of your money, worldly possessions, and your life are to be forfeited there’s really nothing you’re able to do to stop them. It is only through the acquiescence of that group that you are allowed to continue to possess anything.
This would also be just as accurate if you said that money is only your property at the sufferance of those strong enough to deprive you of it.
If you wanted to challenge a particular statement, I think this one is far more ripe:
Rephrased, this is saying that possession of stuff in the first place is a perversion of the natural order, standing alone or modified by the latter part relating to modern economic and political systems. This statement is pretty far out there and unsupported and ill defined it’s quite ludicrous.
Question – how much would this birth control program cost? Isn’t this sort of like the whole, “let’s make it manditory for those on welfare to take drug tests?”
More importantly, what if the government simply stopped prosecuting counterfeiters–how much is that money worth then?
In a non-state society, you live in a house. Someone larger and/or with better weapons and/or more friends than you wants that house. WHat happens?
This doesn’t support the claim that possession of stuff in the first place is a perversion of the natural order. You are positing who possesses the stuff, not the absence of possession.
“Perversion” is too strong a term, and I’ll happily pull back from that: really what I meant to do is to refute the idea that taking someone’s money is a perversion of any natural order. The natural order is that stuff gets taken all the time from whoever is currently in possession of it. Private property institutes a mainly salubrious stultification of possession, meaning that instead of the natural flow of possessions from the less-violent-capable to the more-violent-capable, possessions flow according to mutual interests.
But that’s not how things work in a state of nature. That flow is an artificial construct of the state. And while it’s a desirable flow in general, there are particular times where a society may replace this artificial construct (said salubrious stultification) with another artificial construct (forced systematic redistribution).
Neither one is any more a deviation from the natural state than the other. That’s all I’m saying.
I pretty much agree with this, except the part where you use words I have to use a dictionary to understand.
I think you are mixing the ‘state of nature’ (Hobbes) with what you are calling the natural order and the two aren’t necessarily synonymous but that’s not really on point. I also don’t think that the deviation from the state of nature is necessarily a construct of the state, though in most cases it is. That deviation can come from two individuals deciding not to kill each other and work together, sans the state.
Be that as it may, your original point, taking exception to Francorage’s claim that there is a thing as ‘his money’ is a pedantic point to pick. Of course the government or those in power can do all sorts of nefarious things. That’s not the claim. The claim is better fleshed out that in our current system of rules that have been established and agreed to, there is such a construct as ‘his money’. Now, this is not the hill I would die on, and the idea wasn’t expressed that clearly, but wiping away the assumptions of the current, functioning government that this discussion revolves around seems to miss the thrust of the point.
More salient points would be that the process that is being railed against already happens in a hundred different ways every day through our representative system of government, taxation, and spending. Of course, now that I read the sequence again, I see that you identified this at the outset so really everything past my first sentence in this post should be deleted. I already typed it so I’m going to leave it.
I was all getting ready with a snippy, “Isn’t that what I said?” post, too. Appreciate the reread.
I definitely think there are legitimate objections to specific taxes, and I even tink there are principled, if utopian and unworkable, arguments against taxation entirely. But I find the idea that control of wealth is a “basic human right” to be incoherent, along with its similar arguments that taxation equals theft.
Also, Francorage? I thought at first you were massively misspelling the name, but now I see it’s a namechange. My first association is with Generalissimo, and my second is with James Franco; I’m curious about the real meaning.
And now it’s back to D’Anconia again. WHAT’S GOING ON???